Stelios Manousakis: Guest Artist in Discussion at ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE)

July 02 2014

Stelios Manousakis, currently a guest artist at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe, Germany (Center for Art and Media), will present his work and discuss with ZKM | IMA director Ludger Brümmer and with the public. The focus will be on Hertzian Field #1, a reactive surround sound environment he created during his residency at ZKM.

Stelios's interest in the physical yet invisible radio spaces created by WiFi networks and their interaction with architecture, objects, and our own bodies, led him to discover an obscure surveillance technique and reverse-engineer it for artistic purposes, for performative and installation-based work. The first of a series of pieces to come, Hertzian Field #1 features an innovative system Stelios developed to sense and sonify human bodies within a space, their movement and its patterns, by listening to changes in the flow of ordinary WiFi waves. Multilayered analysis of WiFi interferrence is used to generate a responsive enchanted space, immersing performers and visitors in a hybrid ethereal field of electromagnetic and acoustic waves.